Scribe: Machine Learning, Parafiction and the Perversion of Practice

Scribe (2022) is a choral work for three voices. It is a multidisciplinary project that encompasses palaeography, machine learning, transcription and performance. Furthermore, Scribe is a work of parafictional art in which fact and fiction overlap, conventional practices of palaeography and edition-making are playfully reconfigured and supposed historical authenticity is employed as a compositional material. This paper describes the creative processes in the making of Scribe before evaluating aspects of the uncanny and material agency. It draws upon autoethnographic analysis before contextualising this within the psychoanalytical criticism of philosopher Slavoj Žižek.